For a few moments the valley was left empty, so empty that a fox, who had been prowling unsuccessfully about Monks Barton since dusk, took the opportunity to leave his hiding-place above the ducks’ pool, cross the meadows, and get him home to his earth two miles distant.  He slunk with pattering foot across the snow, marking his way by little regular paw-pits and one straight line where his brush roughened the surface.  Steam puffed in jets from his muzzle, and his empty belly made him angry with the world.  At the edge of the woods he lifted his head, and the moonlight touched his green eyes.  Then he recorded a protest against Providence in one eerie bark, and so vanished, before the weird sound had died.

Phoebe Lyddon and her lover, having given the others some vantage of ground, followed them to their destination—­Mr. Lyddon’s famous orchard in Teign valley.  The girl’s dreary task of late had been to tell herself that she would surely love John Grimbal presently—­love him as such a good man deserved to be loved.  Only under the silence and in the loneliness of long nights, only in the small hours of day, when sleep would not come and pulses were weak, did Phoebe confess that contact with him hurt her, that his kisses made her giddy to sickness, that all his gifts put together were less to her than one treasure she was too weak to destroy—­the last letter Will had written.  Once or twice, not to her future husband, but to the miller, Phoebe had ventured faintly to question still the promise of this great step; but Mr. Lyddon quickly overruled all doubts, and assisted John Grimbal in his efforts to hasten the ceremony.  Upon this day, Old Christmas Eve, the wedding-day lay not a month distant and, afterwards the husband designed to take his wife abroad for a trip to South Africa.  Thus he would combine business and pleasure, and return in the spring to witness the completion of his house.  Chagford highly approved the match, congratulated Phoebe on her fortune, and felt secretly gratified that a personage grown so important as John Grimbal should have chosen his life’s partner from among the maidens of his native village.

Now the pair walked over the snow; and silent and stealthy as the vanished fox, a grey figure followed after them.  Dim as some moon-spirit against the brightness, this shape stole forward under the rough hedge that formed a bank and threw a shadow between meadow and stream.  In repose the grey man, for a man it was, looked far less substantial than the stationary outlines of fences and trees; and when he moved it had needed a keen eye to see him at all.  He mingled with the moonlight and snow, and became a part of a strange inversion of ordinary conditions; for in this white, hushed world the shadows alone seemed solid and material in their black nakedness, in their keen sharpness of line and limit, while things concrete and ponderable shone out a silvery medley of snow-capped, misty traceries, vague of outline, uncertain of shape, magically changed as to their relations by the unfamiliar carpet now spread between them.